What we learned about the brain this week: ravens and brain scans

Remembering passwords is never easy. An endless spiral of upper and lower case characters, symbols and numbers that have to be remembered in slightly different configurations for a billion different websites -- it's tricky. So if you, like me, constantly find yourself locked out of accounts after three incorrect attempts, you'll be happy to hear that Binghamton University are developing a way to use brain scans as positive identification. The system could replace fingerprints, facial recognition and old-fashioned passwords.

The process works by giving subjects an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap and showing them a series of 500 images of words, celebrity faces and stock images, each of which flashes for only half a second. The EEG monitors individual reaction, checks them against existing reactions and is then able to positively identify subjects. An early test identified one subject from a group of 32 people between 82 and 97 percent of the time.

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The team hope that the technology could be used for security -- facial recognition can be easily circumvented, and cracking a password isn't impossible either. If you're dreaming of the day you no longer have to remember your passwords, however, you'll be waiting a while -- the technology is currently slow, and it takes time and space to archive each person's reactions.

It's not the only thing we've learned about the memory this week -- researchers at the University of Tubingen have succeeded in activating dormant memory cells in rats. Using weak pulses of electricity to inactive hippocampus cells, the team were able to induce the cells into remembering the exact location where the impulse had first been administered -- offering us an insight into how memories are formed and stored. The study may also provide new insights into treatment for diseases such as dementia or Parkinson's, which affects the formation of memories.

And at Virginia Tech University, researchers found that neurons physically change in response to new experiences such as learning or emotions. They found that synapses "pair" with neurons in a state of similar plasticity, allowing them to connect in a specific pattern in the brain. This could, researchers say, have implications for "enhanced learning paradigms", as well as for "better understanding the dynamic network properties of the large-scale neuronal networks in the living brain".

If all this talk of brain scanning and password hacking has made you paranoid, you're not alone -- ravens get paranoid too. Although they're less worried about people hacking into their computers, they are concerned about other birds stealing their food, and will display paranoid, watchful behaviour when they feel like they're being observed -- even if they're not.